When one gives so much scarce time and energy from one’s life to a large and unknown public, one needs to know that it is sufficiently appreciated to be a worthwhile use of one’s time and energy. This is especially the case when there are large costs associated with the commitment.

Your response to my quarterly request for donations showed me that enough of you value what I am doing to justify its continuation.

I am convinced that the US, and probably the entire Western world, that is, the American Empire, has entered an era in which respect for truth does not exist in public and private institutions. We have been watching this develop for some time. Think, for example, back to August 3, 2002, a recent time in terms of our present predicament, but a time prior to political consciousness of anyone younger today than 33 years old. In the summer of 2002, the world was being prepared by propaganda for a US invasion of Iraq. On August 3 of that year, the prestigous British publication, The Economist, summed up the consensus of ruling opinion in two sentences: “The honest choices now are to give up and give in, or to remove Mr. Hussein before he gets his [nuclear] bomb. Painful as it is, our vote is for war.”

As Lewis Lapham, myself and others asked at the time, what bomb? The only evidence of a bomb was fabricated and known to be fabricated. The UN weapons inspectors concluded that the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction were a creation of US propaganda. President George W. Bush eventually acknowledged that Iraq had no such weapons. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the lies he was deceived by the Bush regime into telling the UN about Saddam Hussein’s WMD are a stain on his career.

Despite the 2003 US invasion known to have been based entirely on lies, US troops were not pulled out of Iraq until 2011, and whether or not they were pulled out, they are back in Iraq now. None of these facts has had any impact on the good opinion that Washington and the media have of themselves.

Unchastened, Washington and its presstitutes lied about Libya and destroyed that prosperous country. They lied about “Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people,” and would have destroyed Syria also had it not been for the Russians.

Blocked by Russia, Obama, Hillary, and Victoria Nuland turned on Russia, first overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine, and when Crimeans voted practically unanimously to reunite with Russia, the Obama regime and its media whores falsely alleged “Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

This false charge, repeated endlessly still today by the Western presstitutes, became the justification for economic sanctions against Russia that Washington imposed on its European vassals, entirely at their expense, which shows what craven cowards European governments are. If Washington orders “jump,” the UK Prime Minister, the German Chancellor, the French President ask, “How High?”

One of the reasons Donald Trump was elected president was his commitment to normalizing relations with Russia and reconsidering the continuation of NATO a quarter century after its purpose ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump’s commitment constituted a direct threat to the power and profit of the US military/security complex, whose $1,000 billion annual budget requires a major threat that only Russia can provide.

Consequently, Russia and its president have been demonized. American propaganda, bald-faced lies, spread fear of Russia and Putin throughout the American Empire. The Empire’s response to those who confront the propaganda with the facts is to denounce those with the facts as “Russian agents” or “Putin’s dupes.” The hatred of Russia that has been inculcated by the neocons and presstitute media has resulted in Republican Senator John McCain, representing Arizona (to the disgrace of Arizonians), calling on the Senate floor Republican Senator Rand Paul, representing Kentucky, a person who “is now working for Vladimir Putin” for objecting to tiny Montenegro being made a NATO member. http://news.antiwar.com/2017/03/15/sen-john-mccain-rand-paul-is-working-for-vladimir-putin/

When this website was included on a list of 200 Russian agent/dupe websites by a secret, undisclosed group called PropOrNot, I wondered whose money was behind this entity as well hidden as an offshore money laundering operation. I made a joke of it, which amused the Russians.

As no one knows what PropOrNot is, the site has no credibility. So the forces for war moved up several levels to Harvard University Library. On that website someone posted what is essentially the PropOrNot list. Harvard does not say that the list is vetted or explain why anyone should believe it. The list is attributed to a Melissa Zindars, an assistant professor of communication and media at some unnamed institution. It is a list, she says, that she uses in her class to teach students how to avoid “fake and false news.” In other words, the list reflects her own ignorance and biases.

As one reader observed, Melissa tells on her own indoctrination by the presstitute, CIA-serving US media: “I read/watch/listen very widely, from mainstream, corporate owned sources (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes) as well as The Atlantic, National Public Radio, and various local and alternative sources with different political perspectives (Truth-Out).”

So here we have the Western world informed by Harvard University Library of who is safe to read on the basis of an unknown young woman’s biases. Those safe to read are the lying presstitute media who serve the cause of war and the police state.

When you witness this level of total corruption at what pretends to be America’s finest university, and it is on top of the 24 years of nothing but lies from the previous three two-term presidents, who between them have murdered and dislocated millions of people in numerous countries, and not been held accountable for even one of the millons of lives destroyed, you cannot avoid realizing that for the United States and its corrupt vassal states, Truth is something to be avoided at all costs.

When Trump collapsed under pressure and fired his National Security Adviser, Gen. Flynn, he unintentionally gave credence to the charge that any and all who think well of normalized relations with the other major nuclear power are “Russian agents,” and that to be a “Russian agent” means that you are guilty of treason and deserve to be impeached if you happen to be the President of the United States.

The consequence of Flynn’s removal from office has been to enable the Russophobic forces to define as treason the desire for detente with Russia. If this had been imposed on US presidents during the First Cold War, probably life on earth would not exist today.

What is scary about the US and Europe is not merely the gullibility and insouciance of such a large percentage of the populations. What is very frightening is the willingness of the media, government officials, military, and members of professional organizations to lie for the sake of their careers. Try to find any shame among the liars that their lies expose humanity to thermo-nuclear annihilation. It is not to be found. They don’t care. Just let me have the Mercedes and the McMansion for another year.

The Saker, an observant being, says that the color revolution being conducted by the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, the presstitutes, the liberal/progressive/left, and by some Republicans against President Trump is “de-legitimizing the entire [democratic] political process which brought Trump to power and upon which the United States is built as a society.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46658.htm The consequence, says The Saker, is that “the illusion of democracy and people power” has been destroyed both domestically and abroad. The propaganda picture of “American Democracy” has lost its believability. As the false picture crumbles, so does the power that was based on authority constructed by propaganda.

The Saker asks: do we face an endless horror or a horrible end?

As George Orwell said decades ago, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

This is the way the criminals who rule us see it, and it is the way their whores in the media see it. If you tell the truth in America, you are a purveyor of fake news and possibly a traitor.

As long as you support this site, I will continue to face the obvious consequences. Perhaps Neo will turn up.

« A Syrian alliance of jihadist groups known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham said on Sunday it was responsible for a double suicide bomb attack in the capital Damascus that killed dozens of people, » according to Reuters.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham? Where have we seen this name before?

Hours before the Damascus bomb blasts, the State Department made a quick, not-very-publicized announcement:

On Friday, the United States officially declared the newly formed Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) a terrorist group in a written statement. The jihadist coalition consists of Jabhat al-Nusra and some opposition groups that formerly enjoyed US support, including Harakat Nour Al-Din Al-Zenki.

This terrorist designation comes as a major blow to the armed Syrian Opposition as Hayyat Tahrir Al-Sham is considered the single largest rebel faction in all of Syria.

It looks like we called it back on Saturday when news broke of the attacks: These were « moderate » bomb blasts.

It also looks like Robert Fisk was right:

As we’ve pointed out previously, despite several « re-brandings », al-Nusra has never been able to hide the fact that it has received direct and indirect support from the CIA.

By the way, here’s how Reuters ends its report on Sunday’s Damascus bomb attacks:

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was created from a merger of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham – formerly al Qaeda’s Nusra Front – and several other groups. The jihadist alliance, which is not linked to Islamic State, includes some of the most hardline rebel elements fighting Assad.

See? They’re not CIA-linked terrorists. They’re « hardline rebels ».

It’s a good thing Washington distanced itself from these « hardline [CIA-linked] rebels » — and just one day before they blew up Damascus. Excellent timing.
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March 16, 2017 « Information Clearing House » – The question of whether former President Barack Obama actually spied on President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition has been tantalizing Washington since President Trump first made the allegation nearly two weeks ago. Since then, three investigations have been launched — one by the FBI, one by the House of Representatives and one by the Senate. Are the investigators chasing a phantom, or did this actually happen?

Here is the back story.

Obama would not have needed the warrant to authorize surveillance on Trump. Obama was the president and as such enjoyed authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to order surveillance on any person in America, without suspicion, probable cause or a warrant.

FISA contemplates that the surveillance it authorizes will be for national security purposes, but this is an amorphous phrase and an ambiguous standard that has been the favorite excuse of most modern presidents for extraconstitutional behavior. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon used national security as a pretext to deploying the FBI and CIA to spy on students and even to break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, one of his tormentors.

FISA was enacted in the late 1970s to force the federal government to focus its surveillance activities — its domestic national security-based spying — on only those people who were more likely than not agents of a foreign government. Because FISA authorizes judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make rules and establish procedures for surveillance — essentially lawmaking — in secret, the public and the media have been largely kept in the dark about the nature and extent of the statute and the legal and moral rationale for the federal government’s spying on everyone in the U.S.

The mass spying that these judges have ruled FISA authorizes is directly counter to the wording, meaning and purpose of FISA itself, which was enacted to prevent just what it has in fact now unleashed.

We now know indisputably that this secret FISA court — whose judges cannot keep records of their own work and have their pockets and briefcases checked by guards as they enter and leave the courthouse — has permitted all spying on everyone all the time.

The FISA court only hears lawyers for the government, and they have convinced it that it is more efficient to capture the digital versions of everyone’s phone calls, texts, emails and other digital traffic than it is to force the government — as the Constitution requires — to focus on only those who there is reason to believe are more likely than not engaging in unlawful acts.

When FISA was written, telephone surveillance was a matter of wiretapping — installing a wire onto the target’s telephone line, either inside or outside the home or business and listening to or recording in real time the conversations that were audible on the tapped line.

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Today the National Security Agency has 24/7 access to the mainframe computers of all telecom providers and all computer service providers and to all digital traffic carried by fiber optics in the U.S. The NSA has had this access pursuant to FISA court orders issued in 2005 and renewed every 90 days. The FISA court has based its rulings on its own essentially secret convoluted logic, never subjected to public scrutiny. That has resulted in the universal surveillance state in which we in America now live. The NSA has never denied this.

Thus, in 2016, when Trump says the surveillance of him took place, Obama needed only to ask the NSA for a transcript of Trump’s telephone conversations to be prepared from the digital versions that the NSA already possessed. Because the NSA has the digital version of every telephone call made to, from and within the U.S. since 2005, if President Obama last year wanted transcripts of Trump’s calls made at any time, the NSA would have been duty-bound to provide them, just as it would be required to provide transcripts of Obama’s calls today if President Trump wanted them.

But if Obama did order the NSA to prepare transcripts of Trump’s conversations last fall under the pretext of national security — to find out whether Trump was communicating with the Russians would have been a good excuse — there would exist somewhere a record of such an order. For that reason, if Obama did this, he no doubt used a source on which he’d leave no fingerprints.

Enter James Bond.

Sources have told Fox News that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, most likely provided Obama with transcripts of Trump’s calls. The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s. So by bypassing all American intelligence services, Obama would have had access to what he wanted with no Obama administration fingerprints.

Thus, when senior American intelligence officials denied that their agencies knew about this, they were probably being truthful. Adding Adding to this ominous scenario is the fact that three days after Trump’s inauguration, the head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, abruptly resigned, stating that he wished to spend more time with his family.

I hope the investigations of Trump’s allegation discover and reveal the truth — whatever it is. But the lesson here is terribly serious. We face the gravest threat to personal liberty since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 proscribed criticism of the government. We have an unelected, unnamed, unaccountable elite group in the intelligence community manipulating the president at will and possessing intimate, detailed knowledge about all of us that it can reveal. We have statutes that have given the president unconstitutional powers that have apparently been used. And we have judges on secret courts facilitating all this as if the Constitution didn’t exist.

For how much longer will we have freedom?

This article was first published at Lew Rockwell –

Napolitano: Was candidate Trump spied on?

Donald Trump press secretary sensationally claims GCHQ may have colluded with Obama: Sean Spicer claimed British spies were drafted in to avoid any “American fingerprints » on the alleged surveillance

British spy agency denies helping Obama spy on Trump after White House repeats claim: The British spy agency told ITV News that any suggestion it was involved in wiretapping the now president « was utterly ridiculous and should be ignored”.
EXCLUSIVE Leaked Audio Of Obama & Trump’s Phone Calls – CONAN on TBS

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

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